


You make me feel so --

by lalejandra



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Childhood Friends, Community: no_tags, Crossdressing, Friends to Lovers, Gift Giving, Happy Ending, M/M, Panties, Post-Split Panic! at the Disco, Reconciliation, Secrets, Spencer Smith in panties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:13:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21809353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/pseuds/lalejandra
Summary: The post-divorce Spencer/Ryan fic of my heart, full of some of my favorite fanon.
Relationships: Ryan Ross/Spencer Smith
Kudos: 8





	You make me feel so --

**Author's Note:**

> Written for no_tags 2012, prompt #31: Ryan/Spencer - trapped in a romance novel.

  


The package comes while Spencer and Brendon are in Paris. Brendon and Sarah had a great time. Spencer and -- well, they didn't have a great time. 

"Dude," Spencer says, "I am fine. Do not leave your woman to come over here."

"Did you know she hates being called my woman?" Brendon asks. "I don't get it."

"Jackie explained it to me once. It has to do with oppression." Spencer tugs the package out of the giant pile of mail that he's been putting off looking at since before they went out on tour. The label is typewritten and there's no return address. Spencer has visions of hair cookies, except no one's done that for a long time, and he's never gotten anything from fans at his apartment. (They all still send him things to Brendon's house, even though he hasn't lived there since 2009. Hope for real life gay porn springs eternal, he figures.) Plus… okay, he's actually been looking forward to this package. It's the fifth one in the last year or so from whoever is using a typewriter with a broken S -- it's a little higher and has less ink than the other letters, so it's recognizable.

"I'm not oppressing her," Brendon explains. Spencer tears his attention away from the package to listen to Brendon. "I'm _loving her_."

"If you love her, you won't call her shit she doesn't like," advises Spencer. "Now I'm hanging up on you to wallow about being broken up with _again_. Let's go surfing tomorrow, okay?"

"Sure," says Brendon. "Let me know if you want me to come wallow with you."

"Nah, this is a journey I must take alone." Spencer clicks off his phone and uses his fingernail to pick off the tape holding the package closed. It's smallish, about the size of a CD, and soft. When he gets it open, he sucks in a breath at what he sees inside. It's underwear -- no, he corrects himself. 

It's panties. 

They're pretty and soft and a dark blue, the indigo of Spencer's favorite jeans. The front is a shiny, slippery material; the back is lace. They still have the tags on, so Spencer knows they're a size that will fit him, and -- 

Okay, the thing is, there aren't too many people who know much about Spencer's personal, private underwear preferences. There are, like, five people total in the entire world who know. And only one of those people would be sending him anonymous packages with drumsticks and mix CDs and T-shirts and expensive sushi knives and -- and a pair of panties that look exactly like the first pair Spencer ever wore.

Up until now, Spencer hadn't really bothered to formulate much of a theory on the packages, except to worry that they're a lead-up to some kind of annoying practical joke. But the panties change everything.

He picks up his phone and calls Brendon. "I need you right now," he says when the ringing stops.

Brendon groans. "Seriously? Because I'm being taught a really important lesson about anti-oppression."

"Okay, finish getting your dick sucked. Then I need you. Wait -- why the fuck did you answer your phone if --"

"Spence, you just got dumped for the third time in six months, he would've answered the phone no matter what," says Sarah. Then she hangs up on him. That's okay, but it means he's going to stare at the panties until Brendon's done getting his dick sucked and can drive over, and while he stares at the panties, he's going to think about what the fuck Ryan is doing sending him panties and _presents_ when half the time he won't even answer Spencer's texts.

*

"That's what your first pair looked like?" Brendon says. Spencer punches him on the arm. Not too hard, but hard enough to make it clear that Brendon is being a dick. Sometimes he needs reminders. "I mean -- wow, Ryan is your secret admirer, huh? I wondered where you got those knives."

"They cost, like, thousands of dollars," Spencer tells him. "Where would he get that kind of money?"

"How did he know you wanted sushi knives is the better question." Brendon puts out a finger and touches the panties. Spencer wants to snatch them away, but that would -- that would definitely imply something about his feelings that he's not sure he wants to imply. "Spence, seriously."

"Ryan shoplifted them, I think." Spencer digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I mean, he just showed up one day with them."

"So, what, like, he just magically knew because of your soul bond that you wanted panties?" Brendon raises an eyebrow, fearless in the face of Spencer's glare.

"We don't have a fucking soul bond. Jesus, Bren."

"I hate to break it to you, Spence, but you guys are a walking, talking romance novel. Not the kind Sarah reads either, but the kind my _mom_ reads, with the pining and the secret admirer gifts of pretty lingerie and the dark past full of pain." Brendon touches the panties again. "They're pretty." His eyes are dark when he looks at Spencer and he stops talking.

Spencer clears his throat and looks away. "Fuck you," he says shakily. "Your romance novel theory is fucking stupid."

"I don't think it is," replies Brendon. His voice is quiet and serious, the way he only gets when shit is going down. "You know, for all that Ryan wrote _Fever_ , he's always been terrible with words."

"I have no idea what you mean." Spencer looks away from Brendon again, but doesn't look at the panties lying on his coffee table. 

"Yeah?" Brendon's clearly not really asking.

"It was -- it was right before we met you," Spencer tells him. "I was complaining about my boxers and how it wasn't fair that girls got to wear comfortable underwear. Pretty underwear. And that boy underwear was so fucking ugly."

"What, was this before you learned about the magic of boxer-briefs?" Brendon snaps the waistband of his own bright red underwear. 

"They dig into my stomach." Spencer wishes he didn't sound so defensive. "You know that."

"Hey -- Spence." Brendon puts a hand on his shoulder, slides it around until he's hugging Spencer from behind. "Dude, I'm just -- you know I don't care, right? I mean, I told you before, but -- I'm just --"

"No, I know, I just --" There's a horrifying lump in Spencer's throat. He tries to swallow around it, but it's. It's hard. "Why is he such an asshole?" he asks, and lets Brendon hug him.

*

Spencer hand-washes the panties and lets them dry in his bathroom for more than a day before he tries them on. They don't fit perfectly, because they aren't cut for his body, really, so he has to adjust his dick. He's way past the time when just putting on a pair of panties made him hard, but he's full of sense-memory of the first time he put on a pair. In the bathroom he shared with his sisters, Ryan standing guard outside; the panties smelled like flowers, like whatever store Ryan had stolen them from -- now Spencer knows it had to have been Victoria's Secret, but back then he hadn't wanted to imagine Ryan going in and wandering around, maybe pretending he was looking for a gift for his girlfriend. Except he _had_ wanted to imagine it, had spent hours jerking off thinking about _showing_ Ryan, had spent _years_ \--

He presses a hand to his dick in the panties and feels dizzy, takes them off before he comes all over them and has to wash them again. He swaps them out for one of his regular pairs, plain cotton, with a low waist and high legs. They just look like underwear to him now, nothing special.

Not like the pair from Ryan. Those could be everyday panties, but they're not, they're clearly not. Spencer leaves his bedroom and slams the door shut behind him.

*

He takes a picture. 

It's nighttime, he's still a little stoned, a little tipsy from hanging out in Brendon's backyard earlier, watching some of Shane's new shit. He'd felt sober driving home, but now, lying in bed, in the pure blackness of his bedroom, he feels drunk again. Drunk enough to make bad decisions.

He pulls on the panties and smoothes his hands over them, adjusting his dick until it feels right. He's hard, but that's peripheral to how great he feels, comfortable and relaxed. His phone glows blue in the darkness, and when he opens his computer, it glows orange, some program Zack installed to mimic sunlight. He uses his phone to take the picture, and it's all grainy and weird because of the lighting, but the panties shine, and his skin is pale against them, and his dick is clearly there, pressing against the fabric.

It's because he's still stoned. He's still drunk. He doesn't know what he's doing. 

_Love them_ , he types, and sends the message and picture to Ryan.

He falls asleep with one hand curled around his dick -- over the panties -- and the other around his phone.

*

Ryan doesn't text back. Whatever. Spencer isn't surprised, especially, as he tells Brendon, considering what happened.

Brendon blinks at him. "What happened? I mean," he says cautiously, which really really really pisses Spencer off, "did something else happen? That I don't know about?"

"Fuck you. Don't be careful with me," Spencer says. He pushes away his plate of pizza, and grabs for the remote. 

"No," says Brendon, "fuck all of that." He shoves the remote down his pants. "What happened?"

"Just -- after South Africa, that's all I'm talking about." Spencer eyes Brendon's pants, but he doesn't want to end up with a handful of Brendon's dick.

"When he and Jon quit our band and then --"

"No, when we -- uh. Wait, you don't know about this?" Spencer would swear Brendon knew about this.

"I guess I don't," he says.

"We -- in South Africa, that last night? We. And I thought everything was okay, I thought, you know --"

"You fucked Ryan and thought your cock had fixed the band?" asks Brendon, sounding way more disbelieving than the situation warrants, Spencer thinks.

"Sort of? But he, you know, like. He left anyway, and then didn't call, and then…" Spencer shrugs. Brendon looks pissed. "Bren, seriously, I thought you knew, I thought --"

"How would I know if you never told me? Fuck." Brendon runs his hands through his hair, then pulls the remote out of his pants and throws it onto the couch. "I have to go away for a little bit before I fucking kill you. I can't believe you fucking slept with Ryan. Of all the stupid -- okay, I'm going downstairs to the music room. You," he directs, "stay here and watch tv."

Spencer's stomach hurts every time Brendon gets mad at him, and this time is no exception. Now his stomach hurts because he sent Ryan a picture of his dick _and_ because Brendon is pissed.

 _I really thought you knew_ , he texts Brendon. _I wasn't trying to keep it a secret. I just felt stupid._

Then he texts Ryan: _Fuck you, stop sending me gifts._

*

Spencer keeps Brendon's reply and looks at it periodically to remind himself of the truth: _Ryan makes you act like a fucking idiot because you've been so in love with him your whole life that you think this shit is normal._

*

Ryan's reply comes via another package. Spencer almost doesn't open it, but he can't not. Six CDs all put out in the last two years, by a variety of artists. He isn't sure what he's supposed to be getting from this -- one of the CDs is the kind of sugary pop that Ryan eschewed after their BSB phase; another looks like it might be Christian rock or something, the guy on the front is all crucified. Spencer puts on the sugary pop one; he thinks maybe he's heard the first song on the radio in the UK. 

He reads through the liner notes and his spine goes cold. Three of the ten songs on the disc are credited with their music and lyrics to G.R.R. Smith. He tears open the Christian rock one -- four of those are G.R.R. Smith. The third disc is in French, a girl band that looks kind of like The Like, but they're all Asian. All thirteen songs have lyrics by G.R.R. Smith. Two of the discs are the same band, one is an EP and one's a full-length; Ryan wrote the music for the songs on the EP and the lyrics for several of the songs on the album. Spencer wants to break something when he hears the drum tracks on the EP and how intense they are, like the only way Ryan could apologize was to write songs Spencer would have happily played instead of pretty much every song on _Pretty. Odd._

The last disc is a DecayDance band -- Spencer immediately thinks Pete has something to do with this, except when he checks the dates, it's actually the newest release out of all of them, and only has one G.R.R. Smith song on it. 

_Did you know Ryan is selling songs?_ he asks Brendon.

 _Seriously?_ Brendon texts back, and then Spencer's phone rings.

"Seriously?" says Brendon.

"Yeah." Spencer reads the lyrics for one of the sweet pop songs to Brendon. It _is_ sweet -- a love song about pining but knowing your love is better off without you. "Were the songs we listened to when we were fourteen so sad?"

"Avril," says Brendon. He's chewing something obnoxiously. "Seriously, are you sure that's Ryan? Because --"

"Yeah, it's Ryan --"

"-- that song is about you, dude."

Spencer hangs up on him and ignores the three texts Brendon sends immediately after that. He listens to all the G.R.R. Smith songs, and can't figure out how he feels about them. About Ryan using his name. Writing songs about him. Writing songs about their one night of feverish fucking, how they didn't say anything to each other, how he'd been apparently doing the same thing as Spencer, biting back words that wouldn't have helped, that he'd thought Spencer wouldn't have wanted to hear. The chasm between them afterward, the stupid fighting about the band name and songs and tours and contracts.

Spencer's stomach hurts again.

He doesn't understand the songs that are in French, but he doesn't have to. He knows a love song when he hears it.

"You're a dick," he tells Ryan's voicemail. "This is it, this is your last shot. Fucking call me and talk to me like a human being or I am _done with you._ "

*

Ryan doesn't call.

*

This is the part of being in a band that Spencer actually hates -- the part where tour is over but they aren't writing a new album yet.

"Some people call this a vacation, Spence," Ian tells him, and hangs up.

"I am going to see you in _two weeks_ ," Dallon says. At least he sounds patient. "Just give me two weeks to fuck my wife and cuddle my kids, Spence." Okay, maybe more desperate than patient.

"Stop calling while I'm fucking him," growls Sarah.

"Oh, honey, of course you can come visit. We always love seeing you. But -- well, are you okay?" asks his mom. "You sound a little off. Are you fighting with Ryan again?"

*

 _Where are all the romance novels with sad endings?_ , Spencer asks Twitter, then immediately thinks better of it and goes to delete it. Too late, though; it's been retweeted eight times already.

Once by Ryan.

*

To: 41414  
D @thisisryanross Don't fucking RT my tweets about you. Dick.

*

Spencer does not slice anything with his sushi knives, and he doesn't put on the pretty blue panties, and he doesn't listen to the mix CDs or the songs Ryan wrote about him, and he doesn't play with the fucking pair of sticks that actually inspired him to switch over to Vic Firth sticks in the first place. 

Instead, he orders in Thai and watches a _Criminal Minds_ marathon, and texts Twitter with periodic updates about his deep hope that one day Garcia and Morgan will finally get together. 

When his door buzzes, he drags himself over to the intercom. "What?" he snaps. The only acceptable person would be his landlord's facilities guy, and that's only if he's going to fix the lights in the hallway -- one keeps flickering, even though Spencer's changed the bulb four times. The fucking rock star life. Right.

"Hey."

Spencer doesn't say anything else, just hits the buzzer to let Ryan in and unlocks the door. He knows Ryan knows his apartment number, so he waits on the couch, staring at the freeze-frame of Gideon frowning.

When Ryan comes in, Spencer pretends he's not watching as Ryan carefully takes off his shoes and hangs up his jacket and sets down the package he's carrying.

"Hey," Ryan says again.

Spencer pointedly moves over on the couch so there's room for Ryan, and once Ryan's sat down, he clicks the DVR to play.

"Elle is a loose cannon," comments Ryan when the show starts again.

"Shut up," Spencer replies, even though he privately agrees and was really glad when she left the show.

They sit through the rest of the episode, and Ryan eats the whole carton of macadamia beef without offering Spencer any. At the beginning of the next episode, Ryan slouches down, tucks his feet under Spencer's thigh, and fall asleep.

His face is smooth and round, like he's eating regular meals. His clothes are clean, even his socks. His hair is combed. He looks like a regular person, not like someone writing love songs that regularly hit the top ten. Not like someone who spent a while wandering around Europe with a bunch of hipsters, doing performance art. Every time someone posted a picture of Ryan sleeping in the middle of the day, surrounded by people who were awake, Spencer worried Ryan was shooting heroin or something else ridiculously cliché that was going to end in a funeral, but Ryan looks healthy and -- and sober. Ryan looks sober.

Spencer tugs his feet out and holds them in his lap. He sneaks a finger under one of Ryan's ridiculous argyle socks and presses it to the space where his ankle bone dips. 

_Only dude I know who can sleep through Garcia and Morgan flirting_ , he types, and sends it to Brendon with a picture of Ryan, really close up, mostly just his eyelashes sweeping across his cheeks.

 _This is the part of the romance novel where u reconcile & sort out ur misunderstandings_, Brendon texts him a few moments later.

 _Go fuck your fiancee_ , replies Spencer.

The next text is from Sarah: _LOL N come on we all know bden's the bottomest bottom to ever bottom_

Spencer grins at his phone, and it feels weird. Weird to smile. Which sucks, and makes him hate Ryan. Except he doesn't hate Ryan.

Everything is annoying.

*

Spencer wakes up to someone petting his hair, a buzz of talking in the background of his consciousness. A finger smoothes over one of his eyebrows; Ryan. The TV is off, but the table lamp next to the couch is on, dim and yellow when Spencer opens his eyes to stare at the ceiling.

"Okay, uh-huh," says Ryan. He must be on the phone. "Got it, nothing in minor -- I said I got it, trust me, okay? I'll get you something in a couple of days."

Spencer listens to the rest of the conversation; Ryan's doing business. It's kind of awesome; it's nothing Spencer would have ever suspected if Ryan hadn't sent him those CDs. He'd figured Ryan would just bum around for the rest of his life, living carefully off Panic royalties and getting drugs from his rich friends. Totally not the way Spencer had seen Ryan living his life pre-Panic, but he changed so much… they all changed. Spencer changed.

"I changed," he says softly.

Ryan looks down at him.

"I have to go," he says to the phone, and hangs up without waiting for a response. Okay, that's the same. To Spencer, he says, "You changed?"

"I changed, and I guess I figured you were keeping up, but I wasn't keeping up with you either, right? You changed, too, and by the time I noticed --"

Ryan shakes his head a little, and it looks funny from this upside-down angle. "We'd already fallen apart," he says softly.

Spencer leans up a little and brushes his mouth against Ryan's. "Please," he says. He's not expecting anything this time; he knows it won't fix anything. Whatever Brendon says, he and Ryan aren't in a romance novel -- they're in real life, and in real life, things don't work out like this. They never work out. In real life, people have problems and move on. So Spencer's in love, has always been in love.

Eventually he'll get over it.

Ryan kisses him back, tugging him to sit up, to climb into his lap. This is just like South Africa, Spencer on top, straddling Ryan, Ryan's hands on his hips, under his shirt, long fingers digging into skin.

"Please," Spencer says again. "Please, Ryan -- please --"

Ryan pulls Spencer by the hips, pulls him down, and Spencer is so hard, and Ryan is so hard, and this is _exactly_ what happened in South Africa, exactly, down to Spencer's clothes, his sweatpants and T-shirt over a pair of satin panties that slide across his dick and make him _ache_.

But in South Africa, Ryan didn't push him away and scramble over the back of the couch, panting.

"Spence," he says, and puts out a hand like it will keep Spencer away from him. "No, no -- I -- I can't do this again."

" _You_ can't do this again? I think if I can do this again, you fucking can," snaps Spencer. He's so fucking hard, and he _wants_. He wants like he hasn't wanted in weeks, in months. Maybe years. There's a difference, he thinks, and feels dizzy. The difference is desire; the difference is love.

"Yeah, but." Ryan huffs out a breath and looks away, looks down. Spencer wants to throw something at him. "It really -- uh. Fuck."

"Say it," says Spencer numbly.

"It really means something to me, so I can't just -- I can't just _do it_ ," Ryan says in a rush, his words tripping over each other.

"You -- what?" That's not what Spencer had expected to hear. That's actually… exactly the opposite of what Spencer had expected to hear. "But -- in South Africa --"

"Yeah, we came home and everything was the fucking same." Ryan laughs bitterly. "You didn't want to make my music. You didn't want to hang out with me. You went off with Brendon and went surfing and played the drums and that's _not what I wanted_. But you only wanted me if I wanted what you wanted."

"That's --" Spencer wants to say it’s not true, except… it's kind of true. "I'm a jerk," he says instead.

"Yeah, me too." Ryan looks up at him and looks so _young_ , young and rueful. "I didn't think this would happen. I thought --"

"All those songs about me." Spencer moves closer, walking around the couch. "All those presents. The -- the underwear."

"I wanted to be your friend again, but I didn't…" Ryan lifts a shoulder and lets it drop. "I'm dumb, I don't know."

"You only want to be friends?" Spencer's trying to work this out in his head, but he can't get from pretty lace panties and love songs to just friends. "How does that work in your head?"

"It doesn't, not really."

"You didn't answer my texts," Spencer tells him. "You're a shitty friend."

Ryan lifts his shoulder again. "I didn't, I mean, I thought you were. Teasing me."

Spencer shuts his eyes and counts to five. "You're a dumbass," he says. "Your head is clearly broken."

"Broken," agrees Ryan, nodding.

Spencer thinks about Brendon's romance novel theory. That means this is the climax, the part where someone has to make a grand gesture. Ryan wrote him a bunch of love songs and sent him gifts; it's his turn.

"I've pretty much loved you my entire life. Been _in_ love with you. Even when you're a dick," Spencer tells him. "But I will seriously break up with you if you sleep with me and then stop answering my texts and calls again. Because that's really shitty."

Ryan's smile is huge and bright, crinkling up his eyes. "I'm sorry," he offers, and it sounds genuine. "I really didn't… I'm stupid."

"Yeah, you are." Spencer hesitates, then holds out a hand. "Do you want to see the panties you bought me?"

Ryan takes his hand. "I have a picture."

"They're nicer in person," Spencer assures him. "Especially because you can touch."

"Do you remember," says Ryan as they walk down the hall to Spencer's bedroom, "the first time? That's what they made me think of. The ones I got you at the mall when you said --"

"Yeah, they're almost exactly the same," Spencer replies. He pushes his bedroom door open, goes over to his dresser. The panties Ryan gave him are right on top, because he thinks about wearing them every day and then doesn't. "That was --"

"Really hot? I wish I'd been able to…" Ryan stops and sits down on Spencer's bed. "I don't know. So many things could have been different."

"Then we wouldn't be here," says Spencer. He folds his arms across his chest and stares at Ryan. "Is this not where you want to be?"

"I'm going to fuck this up." Ryan stares hard at him, the smile gone from his face. "You know I'm going to. We don't want the same things."

"We want some of the same things," Spencer points out. His heart is beating like it's going to explode. It might actually explode, if Ryan is really going to, like, walk out right now.

"We both want you to wear lacy panties. That's not exactly the stable foundation of a long term relationship." Ryan's voice is dry, but he's smiling a little again.

"We both want each other," Spencer says. He pushes down his sweatpants and green satin panties. His dick is so hard, it's almost curved all the way up to his stomach. He strokes it a couple of times, lets Ryan get a good look at it. He remembers that so clearly from South Africa, the way Ryan watched him hungrily, made him jerk off without Ryan touching him…

He steps into the panties carefully, and once they're up and arranged, he pulls off his shirt. He and Brendon had a workout pact on the last tour, and now Spencer tries to jog a couple of times a week. Mostly for breathing, so he can work up the endurance to play drums longer, but he doesn't mind the way it makes his shoulders seem wider and his hips seem narrower. Ryan seems to like it too, if the way his eyes darken is any indication.

"Do you like them?" he asks lowly. Ryan nods. "Wanna touch?"

He walks over to the bed and takes Ryan's hand, runs his fingertips lightly over the smooth material covering his cock. "Ryan," he says, feeling strangled.

Ryan slides both hands up, so each one is tucked under the band of the panties that goes over Spencer's hips, and his thumbs are in the creases of Spencer's thighs, and his face is right up against Spencer's cock, licking the fabric, sucking Spencer's dick through the panties.

"Spencer," he murmurs, "Spencer, fuck." He tugs the panties down with his teeth and the head of Spencer's dick pops out, and then he's sucking on it, and Spencer's knees are weak and his fingers are tingling, and he _remembers this_ , the way it felt like he was a virgin again, having sex for the first time, figuring everything out little by little, wanting to be touched all over all the time. 

He pulls Ryan off his dick, tilts his head up. "I love you," he tells Ryan. "We both want that, too."

*

Spencer takes a picture of their feet tangled together and sends it to Brendon. Then he texts Twitter: _I don't believe in happy endings, I think you have to keep working at it all the time._

Ryan groans when his phone rings. 

"Spence, you're killing me."

"Brendon, seriously," Spencer says.

"You're not actually having sex right now, or you wouldn't be posting to Twitter," Brendon points out. "Or sending me pictures of Ryan's feet."

Ryan snorts. "That's never stopped you," he says, loud enough for the phone to pick it up.

"Tell Ross that my honor is not at all impugned," Brendon says, laughing. "Are you okay?"

"We still have shit to work out," Spencer tells him.

"Duh. But you're actually going to work it out this time instead of both of you getting scared and running away?"

"Yeah, probably." Spencer looks down at where Ryan is curled against him. Just like when they were kids, teenagers, adults -- just like so many times before, and nothing at all like those times. "Talking is hard."

"Especially when your mouth is full," says Brendon agreeably.

"Oh, shut up. I'll see you in the studio in a week," replies Spencer. 

"Nine days," corrects Brendon. "Please no more pictures of Ryan's feet."

"I agree with him," says Ryan, yawning, once Spencer's hung up. "Please no more pictures of my feet."

"I like your feet. They're like wild animals never before seen near humans," teases Spencer. He puts his phone on the nightstand and tucks down so he can put his forehead against Ryan's. "Do you agree with the other thing he said?"

"Which thing?"

"We're gonna work it out instead of getting scared?" Spencer holds his breath.

"How about we work it out even when we're scared?" Ryan yawns. "I don't think I can stop being scared." Then he kisses Spencer, sliding a hand over Spencer's neck, and Spencer's eyes flutter shut almost involuntarily. When he pulls back, Spencer opens his eyes to see what he's doing. He's just staring, smiling a dreamy little smile.

"I love you," he finally says, and Spencer feels his face split into a grin. "I don't think I said that before. I love you, too."

***

  



End file.
